Why They Keep Making Movies and Shows About Younger Men Falling in Love With Older, Powerful Women

In portraying men as utterly captivating in their beauty and sexual prowess to the exclusion of professional power, this new shift in the culture is justifying the economic emasculation of men.

There’s a new slew of movies and TV shows about older women falling for younger men who not only reciprocate their lust but straight up worship these ladies. The women are in their 40s or 50s, powerful CEOs or business owners at the top of their game, and the men are much, much younger and very hot.

In 2024, you had Babygirl, starring Nicole Kidman as a “high-powered CEO who puts her career and family on the line when she begins an affair with a much younger intern”—played by Harris Dickinson.

Then we got The Idea of You, in which Anne Hathaway plays a gallery owner and recently divorced single mom who is fallen in love with by a much younger guy—an actual member of a boy band—and she must decide whether she will put it all on the line for him.

Earlier this year, Netflix released Vladimir, starring Rachel Weisz, described as follows: “When an English professor becomes obsessed with a handsome new colleague, her already complicated marriage and career are thrown into total chaos.” The book it was based on was about a woman in her 50s reclaiming her place in society who, among other things, develops a crush on a 40-year-old man. The TV show is almost exclusively about a middle-aged woman’s sexual obsession with a man in his 20s.

And just last week, I saw on YouTube a trailer for a new Netflix movie starring Jennifer Lopez called Office Romance. Here’s the description: “Jackie, President and CEO of Air Cruz, runs a tight ship in her business, including a rigid anti-fraternization policy for all her employees. When a sexy new lawyer begins working for her, that policy becomes well-tested.”

The trend has become so well established that the New York Times is insisting it’s a reality. Two weeks ago, it claimed that “younger men are flocking to older women.” “Younger men are increasingly seeking out older women — and it’s not just a dating trend. It’s a shift in power, desire and modern masculinity,” writes the Times. The Times called the trend “overwhelming” based on data from the dating app Feeld, which claims it’s seen a 64% increase in the number of men who are exclusively interested in dating women older than themselves.

That’s not quite an explosion (if 10 men had set their dating apps to exclusively match them with older women, that would mean an increase of 6.4 men). Nor is it new. When people used to meet in real life, age was much less of a factor than when you find people ticking off boxes on an app. People are attracted to each other for any number of reasons. When you’re young, everyone who’s attracted to you is older because everyone is older. Then you get older and some of the people who are attracted to you are younger.

But there is undeniably an explosion in the culture of stories about older, powerful women dating younger men who absolutely worship them—specifically, in the culture produced for wealthy, middle-aged women, a delectable demographic for advertisers given their disposable income and penchant for spending money on themselves.

And this trend tells us a lot about where sexual politics are at in 2026.

Just imagine any of these shows or movies being made with the genders reversed: a CEO falling for his intern; a CEO falling for the lawyer who reports to him; a professor in his 50s relentlessly hitting on a woman in her 20s; a 40-yea-old man falling for a 27-year-old woman. None of these would be made, of course, because the relationships would be seen as abusive; the men would be seen as lecherous, the women as victims. Hilariously, in The Idea of You, Anne Hathaway’s villainous ex-husband is portrayed as a villain for leaving Ann Hathaway for a younger woman! Yet the simple act of reversing the genders suddenly makes it all kosher.

The obvious thing happening here is that the universal law that transgression is sexy had to find a new mutation in the post-MeToo era, so the people writing our TV shows and movies did the laziest thing possible: They simply reversed the genders and the power dynamics to make the women the powerful ones and the men the young ingenues, and called it a day.

In so doing, they copped to the fact that humans enjoy stories that are sexy, that sexiness requires seduction, and seduction requires the manipulation of power. And because we are no longer allowed to find it sexy when men have power over women, at least when that power comes in the form of status and money, they just reassigned those things to female characters and gave male characters the power women used to have—beauty—over which these powerful CEOs and gallery owners salivate and obsess.

What’s funny is it kind of gives the game away: The older women in these stories are not just captivated by these beautiful men with their steel cut abs and bulging biceps. They are utterly helpless before them, sexually enslaved to them—quite literally, in Babygirl. They are willing to upend their entire lives, give up everything, for a taste of these gorgeous men.

Isn’t this an admission that beauty is its own form of power, one that can rival money and status? And if so, doesn’t it stand to reason that in the olden days, when the men had money and status and the women had beauty, those women had power, too? And does it not follow from that that stories in which the genders were reversed would not be abusive or somehow evil and wrong, but just another form of people using the power they have to bring the delicious intensity of limerence into their lives?

That’s certainly how the old film noirs saw things. The men may have had the money and status, but a woman beautiful enough to ruin your life was certainly never powerless.

But there’s something darker at play in this rash of content, and it’s the economic piece of it. In the preponderance of stories of powerful older women and adoring younger men, there’s a tacit admission that men should no longer expect to become the CEO, the one who walks into a room and everyone has to jump to please and service. This is now—or should be, this content suggests—the provenance of women.

Of course, most CEOs are still men. But you’re seeing a real shift. Women are 15 points more likely to graduate from college than men. Their economic fortunes are on the rise. There is data to suggest that white men especially are being discriminated against across all white collar industries.

The message here is clear: Accept your fate. Stop striving for professional power and success.

What should men aspire to? Abs. Arms. That v on the hip that disappears into their pants. How about a little smile, honey?

Buried in these stories is a fantasy in which women can freely impose on men the kind of objectification that they (allegedly) so despised from men. As one of the women in the New York Times piece put it,

We were not necessarily allowed to talk about our desires and the strangeness and singularity of them. So, it does feel transgressive to be able to look at a dating app profile and really objectify a very strong, young man, who’s maybe been tanning in Costa Rica for a bit. I don’t know; I’m just spitballing. So, while that does feel fun, obviously we understand how really filthy and disgusting being objectified over and over again can feel. So again, it is imperfect, but I understand why that can feel like a nice power grab, to sit there and be like: “You know what? I wasn’t afforded this privilege in the past. I’m going to sit here and objectify the hell out of these 24-year-olds.”

Just think about what this woman is saying:

I was not allowed to dehumanize people—which I only see is bad when I imagine it being done to me—so now I do it and brag about it in the New York Times.

Got it.

This is not an evolution into a higher state as a society. It’s just a role reversal that is being justified by a completely false narrative of female victimization that no upper middle class millennial woman has ever actually experienced.

What’s really happening here is that in portraying men as utterly captivating in their beauty and sexual prowess to the exclusion of professional power, this new shift in the culture is justifying the economic emasculation of men.

The men in these stories have been socially neutered—an intern, a grown-up boy from a boy band, someone whose livelihood relies on a powerful woman. That’s being sold to us as a safe space for female longing—objectifying powerless men. But it’s actually a pretty unsafe place for a society to be. After all, the worst proclivities of the old world that was supposedly fixed by the feminists wasn’t bad because it dehumanized women; it was bad because it dehumanized humans.

A healthier culture would admit that beauty is extremely powerful, in men and in women, and so it gives those who possess it a form of power that rivals that of money and status—hence both men and women throwing it all away to chase some person who has sexually hypnotized them.

A healthy culture would allow this to be true of both genders, and allow stories that showed the messiness of power and sexuality in all its glory, in both directions.

Maybe these films and shows are the first step in getting us there, a signal that we’ve turned a corner, and will soon be ready to return to the truth buried in every romance novel (a genre produced exclusively for women!)—that power is sexy and stories are meant to please and it’s time to move on from the prudery imposed on us by those who claim to be our betters.